CYBERCRIME DETECTION
AND FORENSICS
CIS 4385
Final Paper Requirements — Spring 2011

Due at the beginning of class on Thursday, April 21

What should be in the paper?

You should have each of the following:

  1. A summary of what you have learned in class (please delineate material you already knew). This should take at least 1-2 pages, though you certainly may use more if you like.
  2. A section on what you thought was most interesting (this can be anything such an assignment, or a description of an event or sequences of events when you were doing an assignment, or even something that has puzzled you). This should also take at least a page, though of course you can use more if you like.
  3. A cybercrime topic area that you would like to follow up on. This should be the bulk of your paper, and should be five to seven (or more if you like pages). Some suggestions might be
    1. Writing about a new or developing area such as live analysis of Windows environments, and in particular, you might write about the analysis of virtual machines, since virtualization is becoming a very important technique for system administration
    2. A well-understood topic such as static analysis of files, perhaps concentrating on the advances with "fuzzy" matching techniques.
    3. Independent work, where you outline an innovative procedure or thought, such as a new approach to digital forensic work.
    4. A significant installation project in the lab environment, such as setting up a full forsenic investigation environment. A primary component of this would be making an initial choice of software (either a full distribution, or some agglomeration of software), trying to keep tools as modern and as flexible as possible.

Overall, I expect the content of the paper to be at least seven pages long and to have both citations and references.

Plagiarism

Do not commit plagiary. If you quote someone else's work, you must clearly delineate these quotes and cite the original source.

Quoting: for short quotes, you should use quotation marks, such as "Cybercrime has grown to a multibillion dollar field in the last ten years." For longer quotes, it's best to use a separate paragraph that has clearly been indented as a "block" quote, and change fonts. If you add your own emphasis (such as bold or italics), then please note that change with something like "(my emphasis added)"; if emphasis was originally in the source material, please note that also.

Physical format

Please print the paper single-sided, on 8.5 x 11 paper, and the text should be double- spaced. Please staple your paper. Please do not email me this paper, it should be handed to me on April 21nd.

Late Policy

As stated in the syllabus, there will be a 50% penalty in grade for late papers, and no paper will be accepted after April 28th.